New-age app-based marketers are playing by the oldest marketing rules

Funding can solve 99 problems for a consumer-tech company. This country’s fragmented market isn’t one of them. If tier-1 cities are fraught with people taking to social media to demand a ban on their inadequate services, tier-2 cities are full of people largely unaware of their existence or unable to utilise their offerings. No surprises then that hyper-local service apps like Grofers and Peppertap had to shut down operations in many tier-2 cities recently. Even though digital is their strongest suite, to tame the tier-2 space, these techies have had to take the traditional route. This isn’t exactly new; six years ago, online travel portal MakeMyTrip had to open 19 retail franchise stores to push sales of its hotels & holiday packages. Taking a few pages off the traditional marketing book is nothing compared to that, one would contest. So, let’s see how some appwallahs are faring on the Aam Raasta of marketing:

Daakiya Parcel Laya

There are over 19,000 Pin Codes (Postal Index Numbers) in our country. Mumbai district alone has 239 of them. This little trivia is of importance to the organisers of World Post Day (9th October) and the entire consumer-tech space that has anything to do with delivery. Luring the consumer with your wide range of selection is easy. But beyond Aur Dikhao lies the task of Ab Pahunchao (now deliver) — something e-comm players are struggling with because of poor last mile connectivity in many tier-2 cities. Why just tier-2, in fact, some of the Mumbai residents will vouch for the hyper-local services not acknowledging their area’s Pin Code as well. "There’re only so many Pin Codes any consumer tech player can cover," says Samir Kumar, VP - category management, Amazon India. At least 4000 delivery points all over the country aren’t covered under the online delivery players’ radar. To strengthen its presence, Amazon tied up with the Department of Posts (Indian postal system). Ever since the partnership, Amazon has seen a spike in demand from Tier-2,3 cities. In fact the rate is faster than that of growth from the Tier-1 market. "We’ve delivered printers to places in Arunachal Pradesh now, for instance, which was unheard of before the tie-up with post offices," Kumar tells us.

Lesson from traditional marketers: Use the power of kirana store to build a cost-effective supply chain. Here, post offices became Amazon India’s kirana stores, the postman its ‘chotu’ aka delivery boy.

The Burgeoning

Train Tier-2 is not alien to travel. But how often do you hear of people from Hubli booking a flight to Rourkela (both cities have airports, yes) on a weekly basis? To increase the volume of transactions on its travel portal from this segment, Cleartrip had to offer a more utilitarian product, and via a medium that was easily accessible to this market; and desktop wasn’t that. So they pioneered the introduction of train-booking facility on their mobile app. "Earlier, only the top 10 cities contributed to train-bookings. Post the launch, top 25 cities are contributing to 65% of the train transactions," says Subramanya Sharma, CMO of Cleartrip. In August’15, Cleartrip also launched a section cal led ‘Activities’ for the app only. Activities is a listing of things to do, places to visit, food to eat, in a user’s place of interest. It enables the travel portal to tie up with vendors on a commission basis. While there are 40-50 transactions a day coming from Tier-2 cities for this section, the supply is outpacing demand — which makes Sharma hopeful of its prospects.

Lesson from traditional marketers: Online travel is quite unlike FMCG but what the latter teaches you is that no matter what your product is, it is consumed locally — so it has to make sense to that market (Trains). And while ATL is good for top-of-mind recall, what’ll increase a user’s interaction with your brand is activation led marketing (Activities).

Stick on to Stick in

Currently, less than 5% of Zomato’s overall revenue and 10%-15% of its entire traffic comes from Tier-2 cities. The food-ordering app is not actively looking to monetise all Tier-2 cities, says Pramod Rao, SVP of growth at Zomato. But his operations team is constantly meeting merchants and restaurants in these areas. And when they leave, they don’t shy away from slapping a Zomato sticker on the front door. "Since digital doesn’t work there, we have to largely rely on word-of-mouth and communitydriven marketing," he says. With online ad blocking getting stronger by the day, maybe other players too will have to resort to the good old BTL ways. Lesson from traditional marketers: "The best learning from the brick & mortar players is that you have to hit the ground, go from one kirana store to another, and make sure your brand is present everywhere," says Rao. In Zomato’s case: Every restaurant in the bylanes of Kanpur and Nagpur is its kirana store.

Return of Missed Call

"The level of maturity for our business in each of the regions is different and the traditional approaches that may not be relevant today will have a different story tomorrow," says Vineet Sehgal, CMO of Quikr. That explains why the online classifieds platform is betting on the classic ‘missedcallvertising’ approach for its jobs vertical QuikrJobs.

Users from Tier-2,3 cities send a missed call to Quikr’s call centre and explain their requirement and skills. In the last three months of tracking the potential of this approach in these cities, QuikrJobs has seen the number of missed calls grow three times. Lesson from traditional marketers: From HUL to Colgate to Quikr, missed call comes to everyone’s rescue.

Recharge my phone wallet

For someone in the aggregation business like Bookmyshow, the Tier-2 challenge is two-pronged. It has to increase supply (of movie listings) and solve the no-cash-payment problem from the consumer’s side. Over the last year and a half, Bookmyshow has built a team led by seniors from the cinema business who’ve taken the single-screen tieups from 200 to 1000. But how were they to conquer the abysmal percentage of online transactions? By leveraging kirana stores, what else. "We are in the process of launching kirana-store led recharge scheme for users in at least 10 pilot cities of the Tier-2 market. These kirana shops (that also provide mobile recharges) will provide top-ups to Bookmyshow wal let holders," says Marzdi Kalianiwala, VP - business intelligence, Bookmyshow. Now to see how successful the feat of creating access to those who don’t have digital spending power turns out to be.

Lesson from traditional marketers: When it comes to tier-2: Kirana is a part of the ecosystem, brick & mortar or click & scroll-bar.

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